Solid State Drive (SSD): A guide between 2.5" SATA and M.2

Solid State Drives or SSD are evolving rapidly since past years. Back then, it was pretty expensive yet have shorter lifespan although it can boot your PC with such blazing speeds. Nowadays, the SSD lifespan got better and there are also some technological advancement of flash storage technology which allows people to afford it with such bargain price. In the SSD market, there are many types of SSD drives but the very common SSD drives are either from SATA interface or M.2 interface. So, let's talk about the comparison between these type of SSD drives.

What is 2.5" SATA SSD?

An example of 2.5" SATA SSD

The 2.5" SATA SSD are commonly used by people who are wanted to upgrade their PC with better performance. Size are the same as the laptop hard drive (HDD) but much more faster than traditional HDD disks. The advantage is you can use existing SATA port to upgrade your existing boot drive into SSD and if you're planning to upgrade your 10-year old machine with Windows 10, an SSD disk is a wise choice. Although that SATA SSDs performs much better than HDD, but its performance were limited to SATA 3 interface which is using 6Gb/s, nothing much faster when using SATA port. At least, it provides some affordable SSDs that you can buy.

What is M.2 SSD?

The M.2 SSD have various kinds of types in the market, and it is divided to 2 types, one of them using legacy SATA transfer interface and the other one is using the latest PCI Express transfer interface. Meanwhile, the M.2 SSD have different kinds of pin notches which is to differentiate between a budget-type M.2 SSD drive and the high-performance M.2 SSD drive.

Usually, a budget-class M.2 SSD drive have either "B key" or "B+M key" which is having both pin notches but most of budget M.2 SSD comes with both notches due to compatibility with most of M.2 slots on the motherboard. Usually SATA-type M.2 SSD carries either "B key" or "B+M key" notches while some of PCI Express M.2 SSD drive also have "B+M key" notches but its performance not really much further compared to the "M key" notch which is only found on some high-end PCI Express-type M.2 SSD drive.

Comparison between M.2 key notches

This is PCI Express (NVMe) type M.2 SSD

This is SATA-type M.2 SSD with both notches

SATA-type M.2 SSD drive delivers the fast disk access but similar as the 2.5" SATA SSD drive, its performance were limited up to 6Gb/s. Meanwhile, the PCI Express is just blazing fast but it comes with hefty price and you might need to take a look at your PC/laptop motherboard first before installing PCI Express-type M.2 SSD on your PC/laptop.